From an interview with someone on the engineering team (sounds like). Lots of interesting if unsurprising stuff about privacy, and this:

Rumpus: So tell me about the engineers.

Employee: TheyÃ¢â‚¬â„¢re weird, and smart as balls. For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Our site is coded, IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢d say, 90% in PHP. All the front end Ã¢â‚¬â€ everything you see Ã¢â‚¬â€ is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means heÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s literally rewriting the entire language. ThereÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s this distinction in coding between a scripted language and a compiled language. PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top. But with a compiled language, the program you write is compiled into an executable file. It doesnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t have to read the program from beginning to end in order to execute commands. ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s much faster that way. So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation youÃ¢â‚¬â„¢d have with a human being in your entire life. You just canÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then heÃ¢â‚¬â„¢d get it. And thereÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs.

It’s a rum old thing, is the Joseph Rowntree report into Britain’s database state. It’s clearly written, normally dispassionate, and rivetingly annoyed. It crystallises many of the anxieties many of us are feeling about the development of the country’s new surveillance-and-tracking society. But it occasionally cheapens this effort with a dose of overreach. For instance:

Stephen is fourteen and lives with his mum in Nottingham. He is listed on all the big databases that every youngster is on nowadays: ContactPoint givesÃ‚Â links to all the public services he has used; the NHS Care Record Service has his medical records; the National Pupil Database has his school attendance, disciplinary history and test results; he is on the Child Benefits Database, and also on the National Identity Register since he applied for a passport;Ã‚Â the Government Gateway has a record of all his online interactions with public services; and the ITSO smartcard he uses for local bus services and discount rail fares has been tracking him ever since his mum refilled it with her bank card. His mother frets about all this Ã¢â‚¬â€œ when she was a teenager in the 1980s, things like medical and school records were all kept on paper.

And although the family has always kept its phone number ex-directory and always ticks the Ã¢â‚¬Ëœno informationÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ box, they get ever more junk mail. More and more of it is for Stephen.

Like millions of children, he is on a few more databases besides. After an operation to remove a bone tumour, he needed an orthopaedic brace for two years, which brought him into the social care system. As his teachers could see from ContactPoint that he was known to social workers, they expected less of him, and he started doing less well at school. The social care system also led to his being scanned for ONSET, a Home Office system that tries to predict which children will become offenders. The Police National Database told ONSET that StephenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s father Ã¢â‚¬â€œ who left home when he was two and whom he does not remember Ã¢â‚¬â€œ had spent six months in prison for fraud, so the computer decided that Stephen was likely to offend.

When he was with some other youths who got in a fight, the police treated him as a suspect rather than a witness, and he got cautioned for affray. Ten years later, after he thought he had put all this behind him and completed an MSc in vehicle testing technology, Stephen finds that the governmentÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s new Extended Background Screening programme picked up his youthful indiscretion and he can not get the job he had hoped for at the Department of Transport. He tries to get jobs in the private sector, but the companies almost all find excuses to demand EBS checks. Two did not, but one of them picked up the fact that he had been treated for cancer; all cancer data is passed to cancer registries whether the patient likes it or not, and made available to all sorts of people and firms for research. Given the decline in the NHS since computerisation, most decent employers offer generous private health insurance Ã¢â‚¬â€œ so they are not too keen to hire people who have had serious illnesses.

That’s a powerful story, but it’s somewhat cheapened by the uncited asides like “given the decline in the NHS since computerisation.” This just gives politicians a way to discredit the report in its entirety, as was done (rather shockingly) by the ministerial drone who was sent out to knock the report down on Today this morning.

On the other hand, there’s also some fascinating insight into how gridlocked ministerial and civil service thinking is on this stuff. For instance:

There is a sense in the senior civil service and among politicians that the personal data issue is now career-threatening and toxic. No-one who values their career wants to get involved with it. This is irresponsible and short-sighted. Like Chernobyl, the database state has been a disaster waiting to happen. When it goes wrong, some brave souls need to go in and sort it out while others plan better ways to manage things in the longer term.

The peers say Britain has constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world in the name of combating terrorism and crime and improving administrative efficiency.

The report, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, by the Lords’ constitution committee, says Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV, with an estimated 4m cameras, and in building a national DNA database, with more than 7% of the population already logged compared with 0.5% in the America.

The cross-party committee which includes Lord Woolf, a former lord chief justice, and two former attorneys general, Lord Morris and Lord Lyell, warns that “pervasive and routine” electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information is almost taken for granted.